Last Chance to Test

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The launch of the new Slope of Hope is, God willing, drawing close. After way more time and way more money than I ever expected, it is just about done, but I really want to make sure we get as many kinks out as possible before the launch. Please, for YOUR sake, test the site, because I will be far, far more attentive now to your weird-ass problem with your Firefox browser on a Commodore 64 than I will after we are live. I want to trace down oddities NOW, not once we’re in production. Please! With sugar on top.

The location of the new site is http://slopeofhope.com. Go ahead and click that link to fire it up. Bang on it. Play with it. See what you can break.

homepage

When you go to the site, it’s not going to know who you are (at least I don’t think so). You can do either of a couple of things………one, you could create a new account, or two, you could sign up with your existing account. I’d sort of prefer you create a new account (or several) just to test what it’s like to be a new user, but that’s up to you. At any time, you can log in to your actual account.

Let me stop here and make clear that you’re not going to hurt anything. Making a new account (that is, a free account) is meaningless. This is all for the purpose of TESTING. So you can make twenty new accounts if you want. The idea here is to find stuff that’s broken, stuff that’s unclear, or stuff that doesn’t work.

The site should be quite obvious to navigate. In short, what I’ve tried to do here is change the Slope of Hope from A BLOG THAT HAPPENS TO HAVE OTHER STUFF into A WEBSITE THAT JUST HAPPENS TO HAVE A BLOG.

The blog is no longer ‘front and center’ – – you have to “drill” for it. This is a very deliberate decision, because I wanted to make SocialTrade and SlopeCharts every bit as prominent and vital to the site as the blog posts.

The menus are self-explanatory. You’ll notice a handful of items are special-looking for emphasis. I wasn’t quite sure how to call these out, but I’m fairly happy with how we did it. Anyway, feel free to explore every menu item. What I’m looking for is – – well – – anything wrong or unclear. Everything from a spelling error to something completely broken.

menu

The fact is that MOST of the engineering behind the new site isn’t visible to the user. There are a lot of boring reasons I decided to start the site totally over again, so there’s no need to go into them here. But for the visible stuff, there are plenty of new bells and whistles, and I’ll just leave it to you to stumble over them.

blogposts

One of the ironies of this engineering project was that the majority of the budget actually went to something that has never made me money at all: SocialTrade. However, I thought it was important to do a good job integrating it with the site.

socialtrade

There are also some completely new sections with new content:

tutorials

Simply stated, I need you to beat up on the site and, if you have suggestions or problems, send me an email about them. Please note that the content is several months out of date. So if the SocialTrade stuff and blog posts seem to end around December, not to worry, that’s deliberate.

Please take some time to try it out (the more thoroughly, the better). including on mobile devices. I am looking forward to getting your feedback! Please remember to email me your thoughts, feedback, etc.! Thank you!